Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen by Jimmy McDonough: review

Tammy Wynette rarely stood by her man, finds Helen Brown, as she delves into
the soulful new biography by Jimmy McDonough

Tammy Wynette used to joke that she had spent 20 minutes writing Stand by Your Man, and the next 20 years defending it. The liddle lady said she thought it was a purdy love song. “I was taught the old, true South,” she said, “Daddy made all the decisions. A man’s word was law. That’s what bothers me so much when people make fun of Stand by Your Man. That’s all I knew.” You can almost see her batting those heavily mascaraed lashes as she falls for her own “down-home, good girl” act. But she was talking southern fried baloney. For a start, her father died while she was an infant. She rebelled against her mother, stepfather and the rich grandfather who spoiled her rotten. And she walked out on her first four husbands. Her second husband was actually waiting outside the recording studio with the divorce papers while she recorded the track.

Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen by Jimmy McDonough

“Unimaginative types who don’t savour esoteric looks might be dim-witted enough to consider her a tad homely,” says her latest biographer Jimmy McDonough. “Hell, head-on Wynette looks like a Siamese cat in a wig hat.” But he still has “the hots” for her. So he tends to go easy on the first lady of country in his thoroughly researched and conversationally relayed account of her troubled life.

Virginia Wynette Pugh was born in 1942, in Itawamba County, Mississippi. She’d talk of picking cotton on her Granpa Chester’s 600-acre farm, but she did it as a family chore, not to put food on the table. She wasn’t born into poverty like her contemporary Dolly Parton (whose folks paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of corn meal). But she was born into tragedy. Five months before her birth her father was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Ten months later he lost his sight. His last happy moments were spent at the piano with his baby daughter, whose friends would later theorise that both the pain she expressed in song and her unending search for a prince charming, had their roots in the loss of her father.

Whatever the cause, young Wynette ran wild. Schoolfriends remember a glamorous teenager always fixing to elope with some boy or other. One month before graduating from high school she married a construction worker called Euple Byrd. In her autobiography she claimed he mocked her dreams of a singing career, but McDonough’s conversations with their friends lead him to suspect Byrd wasn’t so bad and that Wynette was probably unfaithful to him. Whatever the facts, in 1968 the pregnant Mrs Byrd packed two kids into her ’59 Chevy and headed for Nashville. There she’d rattle through another marriage and hit the big time as the voice of the tortured housewife.

Success was no mean feat for a female artist on the country music scene at that time. The industry was so sexist that Kitty Wells’s female response to Hank Williams’s Honky Tonk Angels had been banned from the Grand Ole Opry, and radio stations had a policy of not playing two “girl singers” back to back. Along with Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette changed all that.

Alas, she needed a tragic private life to fuel her songs of domestic grief, and her third marriage – to beady-eyed country star George Jones (“The Possum”) – gave her plenty. He was a drinker with a bizarre need to flush hundreds of dollars down the lavatory while on a binge. And he was so fastidious about his appearance that he delayed driving Wynette to the hospital to deliver their daughter because he couldn’t find the right shade of green trousers. Both Jones and Wynette were melodramatic and self-destructive: their union was destined to fail.

After leaving Jones it was all downhill for Wynette. She probably faked her own kidnapping in 1978 and an addiction to painkillers was catching up with her. McDonough repeats a tale of George Richey, her last husband, administering drugs to the fading star as he took control of the finances. When she died in 1998, Richey, who liked swanning about in a floor-length mink coat, got everything. The four daughters she had often neglected but always claimed to love got nothing. Old friends were repulsed when Richey filled her house with buxom blondes – and remarried very quickly.

McDonough wishes that the classic country formula – three chords, steel guitar and a sad song – hadn’t exhausted itself along with Wynette. But he reminds us that her tortured voice is now available at the click of a mouse, and he hopes that “right about now one of her songs is getting some lost soul through a dark and lonely night”. Because after all, he’s just a fan.